Answering pertinent questions about Southeastern Michigan with statistics and maps

Menu ☰

There are four types of equalized property values: residential, industrial, commercial and agricultural. Residential property values are the largest contributor to the region’s total property values. In this post the 2016 total equalized values of residential properties are presented, meaning the values presented represent the municipality as a whole and not the average per residential property.

According to the State of Michigan, the equalized value of a property is the assessed value (which is about half the property’s market value and is set by the assessor) that has been adjusted by the County Board of Commissioners and the Michigan State Tax commission to ensure they are at the constitutional 50 percent level of assessment. All information presented in this post has been approved by the local county Board of Commissioners.

In the tri-county area (Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties) Oakland County experienced the largest percentage increase in total equalized property values between 2015 and 2016. Oakland County experienced a 7.4 percent increase while Macomb and Wayne both experienced about a 1 percent increase.

In total, Oakland County also had the largest equalized property values in 2016 at $65,084,851,114 (more than $130 billion in actual value); residential values made up $49,933,653,218 (more than $100 billion in actual value) of that. The City of Troy in Oakland County had the highest total residential equalized property value in the county at about $3.8 billion (about $7.6 billion in actual value). This value was higher than Detroit’s total equalized residential property value of $2.5 billion ($5 billion in actual value). Wayne County’s total property value was $44,884,066,562; residential equalized property values made up $29,476,949,702 of that. The community in Wayne County with the highest total residential equalized property value was Grosse Ile with about a $3.3 billion total ($6.6 billion in actual value). In Macomb County the total equalized property value for the county in 2016 was $30,605,374,212 ($61.2 billion in actual value), with residential equalized property values making up $22,477,768,361 of that ($44.8 billion in actual value). Sterling Heights in Macomb County was the municipality in that county with the largest total residential equalized property value at about $3.5 billion ($7 billion in actual value). In Washtenaw County, where the total residential equalized property value was $13,045,788,080 ($26 billion in actual value), Ann Arbor had the highest total equalized residential property value, in the county and the region, at about $4.25 billion ($8.5 billion in actual value).

The map below shows that the municipalities with the highest total equalized values are mainly located in the Metro-Detroit area where home values and median incomes are traditionally higher. There are exceptions though, such as Detroit, where the median income and household value are below communities like Grosse Ile, Troy and Sterling Heights. However, Detroit is geographically the largest municipality in the state at about 139 square miles. The communities in the region with the lowest total equalized residential property values for 2016 are the rural communities, with larger amounts of agricultural land, located on the edge of the region in St. Clair, Livingston, Monroe and Washtenaw communities. In St. Clair and Monroe counties there was not one municipality where the total equalized residential property value was above $1 billion ($2 billion in actual value), while in Oakland County majority of the communities had total residential property values at or above that threshold.